If you have ever been interested in awk and sed Unix utilities, then you probably know about the awk1line.txt and sed1line.txt files that are floating around the Internet. Each file contains around 80 idiomatic sed and awk one-liners for performing various text modification tasks.

I wouldn't really say that AWK and SED encourage these one liners, rather I would say they enable one liners.

When you work with these tools to the comfort level that you can just spit out these one liners, that's where this facility becomes a powerful command line tool rather than a just a scripting language.

I don't think twice about just pounding out long pipelines in the shell, or short scripts. Similarly, if it can fit on one line, I'll consider doing the same with AWK or SED.

These are one off events that never last beyond perhaps the shell history.